Relentless
by coincident
Summary: If you wish to build a ship, do not drum up people to gather wood and assign them tasks, but teach them to long for the immensity of the sea. Madara/Hashirama, one-shot.


**A/N: **An old, sloppy story I didn't have the heart to toss out or painstakingly retcon, jossed though it has been as of chapter 620 or so. AU as all hell, no goofball Hashirama, no unlikely childhood Romeo and Julietship, sorry.

**Disclaimer: **_Naruto_ not mine, quote in the summary by the peerless Antoine de Saint-Exupery.

* * *

Today Hashirama is carrying a fruit in a thatched basket, crisscrossed with marketplace slashes to mark the quality. It is clear that it has been bought, not grown, and for this reason Madara allows him exactly three feet of entrance toward the center of the chamber: no more and no less.

"This is called a musk-melon," says Hashirama, and cups it gently like an infant's skull. His concern lurking under the skin, visibly smooth as a gland. "It would have gone to the daimyo, but I want you to try it."

Had he said _perhaps you should try it _or even _would you like to try it_, Madara would have done it without argument. "I am not overfond of fruits."

"It was purchased for your sake. I wouldn't give it to anyone else."

The insult delivered with the gift is probably involuntary but standard. He retreats back another foot, ceding the private ground of floorboards, and allows Hashirama to spread the linen dining cloth in front of him.

The morning is deciding what it wishes to become; sun folds into the room in the perfect shape of a woman's fan and Hashirama's violet shadow extends longer than the space Madara has allotted him, staining the edge of his robes like a wetness. This, too, can be borne in silence, as he will bear it.

"I suppose you will share it with me," he says, and Hashirama smiles before splitting the melon with his hands.

The meat of the fruit is cloying as charity.

When about half of his portion has disappeared, Hashirama lifts his own to his lips. Like Madara he is unable to break the habit of eating the fruit as if it is war rationing and sets aside a portion for what must be either his brother or the Uzumaki girl. The melon is somewhat mealy despite its luxury status and has no juice so to speak but a droplet clings to his wrist, outlining the slipstream jut of a vein beneath before collecting there shining in the tissue pocket before his palm begins.

He lifts his hand to his mouth and blots the moisture away with his tongue. The motion brims like the droplet, a messy thing full of careless intimacy. Madara averts his eyes.

Hashirama is saying, "—it's good. One of the best I've—do you like it?"

"Is that relevant?"

Hashirama's hand veers to the back of his neck, stops there leaving a shimmer of moisture where his wrist touches the flesh. He is wearing twice-layered kosode which Madara supposes is what someone should wear in a truce encampment like this one, civilian clothing that does not betray a clan affiliation. Hashirama is bad with his ties and it always slides. Today exposing shoulders darkened as if eternally shaded by leaves. The slab of muscles moving under the tanned skin of the neck and Madara's throat closes up around the fruit; he never knows what Hashirama means by this, here, invading the space he has made austere for himself with this sort of unabashed physicality.

"If you have some witless notion that eating this has been a matter of—ceremony, or—"

"Stop," says Hashirama, and he stops. Like that. His body stops before his mind gives it permission and he is furious, but Hashirama doesn't appear to notice. "To break bread together, and to learn one another's lives, is the only reason these negotiations are taking place this way. Food is a basic human need. You should know that as well as anyone."

Madara sets the melon down. Hashirama massages the bridge of worry between his eyebrows.

"I meant only that as someone who has managed the Uchiha storehouses since your adolescence, you would know the importance of sustenance. You don't need to take it so personally."

"Matters of clan administration _are_ personal."

"Perhaps you misunderstand what I—what we wanted from truce. This isn't an armistice. This is a permanent arrangement, with aim towards mutual benefit. We of the Senju would like to _help_ you. Our storehouses have never lacked for grain."

The tactlessness of the comment is so galling Madara cannot believe he has actually said it. He shoots his hand out, knocking over the pieces of melon and disheveling the dining cloth. He does not rise to his feet but moves forward, forcing Hashirama back and reclaiming the three feet of space he had initially allowed.

"If fire were _grain_," he hisses, "our storehouses wouldn't lack for it either. Don't disparage us because you were born with more than you deserved."

The fruit seems to have congealed all along the inside of his throat, choking him, schooling him with sweetness. He wants to vomit the saccharine onto Hashirama's hands; what need did he have, for such a gift? What need was there for him to take it?

"Please—"

"Leave me," Madara snaps, head dizzy. "Get out, and don't think again that because my brother is dead I have given up. I am not your well-wisher."

"No one mentioned your brother but you."

Hashirama eyes the melon with consummate serenity: only a failed technique. Nothing alarming when one has the entire arsenal of the earth at his command. Placing his palms to the floor, he bows, retrieves the scattered pieces of fruit, and rises.

"I didn't presume to come to you as a familiar," he says, and Madara knows this to be true: he came as men come to their lords, with his purchased fruit, the luxury of the gift. He had never seen such a thing in his own hands before. "But after so many years, I would think you might allow yourself to trust me."

"You've always been a simpleton."

He looks down at Madara—down at Madara; he cannot bear it. Madara rises as well and the farce is completed: a gracious host, rising to bid farewell to his guest.

The sun has now gone from golden to a bolder white. Five-note birdsong surfaces and resurfaces throughout the truce compound. Men and women lapping up the last dregs of summer in civilian robes as if they have never known a day's fighting, and there he is, facing their leader in his clan's high-collared fatigues as if he has only now arrived from a foreign land or a long, long mission. Like this truce thwarts him, shows him in words or gestures or simple facts like linen that he has been caught in the wrong place, the wrong time. Eternally unprepared.

Hashirama says, "You may not consider yourself my well-wisher, but I have always considered myself yours. If I hadn't, you would not be—"

It is a credit to Hashirama that he can finish the sentence. It is more of one that he does not. _Alive, _says the space between them, and becomes so.

Hashirama unfolds his hand to reveal a slice of the melon, and not removing his eyes from Madara's he puts it between his lips. Barehanded, the drop of juice again slithering down the path marked by that jutting vein.

Madara's throat is full to burning, sweet, too sweet. A film of that sweetness descending over his eyes coloring the morning nearly incandescent.

"_Leave me_."

As he does the taste sticks in Madara's mouth as sicksweet as a bare gum and he darts his tongue sharply into the pockets behind the teeth, at once avoiding the sensation and seeking it. He retreats back into the center of the room and assumes his seated position on the floorboards again. By the door patches of wetness still cling to the grained pine, gleaming like muscle.

He closes his eyes and the ease of Hashirama's hands and his skin throb there, red-black-bright against the darkness; their presence mocks him, an insult with the gift, and with the syrupy film of truce coating his fingers and his tongue he can barely distinguish one from the other.

* * *

Izuna was never actually very good at combat genjutsu, which was one of the reasons he had to be kept so close during battles. The wide eyes with their exaggerated beauty were mostly unsuited for offensive illusions. Izuna was much better at candyfloss sugary things that took him days and sometimes weeks to weave: all of them dreamscapes insubstantial and filigreed whole. Gilt and feathers. Fall leaves edged in a tracery of gold, summers that glittered to a point just below pain inside the caverns of Madara's skull. There was no point to these experiments and really they were just a method for Izuna to practice dovetailing his natural detail and accuracy with speed and compulsive power.

As children when they shared a bedroll Madara would jolt in dreams and see behind closed eyes the sight of tall cool mountains, or the green endlessness of water with a constellation of white lights above the surface, impossible when they had never seen the sea.

_Onii-sama_, came the breathless voice, _my apologies, you can wake up if you'd like _and Madara didn't know how to tell him he didn't ever want to wake up, only wanted to stay suspended beneath the woven skein of that calculated loveliness for a moment longer, only one moment. Now, with every possible surface of his body touching the floor, he mimics in posture both those nights in the bedroll and his brother's final convalescence.

It is all he wants. The sublimation of his self in the sea spun out by that voice, if for only a moment longer.

Only one moment.

* * *

Madara had lost his first retainer to the mangekyou eye and his second as well; his third is in no danger by the simple fact of his constant presence. The old man serves as he served Madara's parents before him, his existence by now dimmed to a hearthfire and not a would not shed tears were he to die for his sight and this is why he never will.

"Well?"

A wide-angle night. The seventh of truce. He is collapsed against the lintels of the shoji door with his bowl held out, balanced on the tips of his fingers—Uchiha are, if nothing else, physically built for aristocracy; perhaps this is why he has always felt they deserve it above others. Bodies are instruments that should fulfill their intended functions.

He taps one fingernail on the edge of the bowl and the old man pours sake into it as, about ten rooms away, Sarutobi or his tiny son must be doing for Hashirama. His has been heated to a point just below boiling. It is still early in the season but his body with the Uchiha awareness of flame senses the fire bleeding out of the world; seeks the next nearest warmth to replenish itself.

There are six flat stones laid out in the courtyard, probably cool to the touch from the approach of nightfall. In the sky rain burns softly, the premonition of the fall, seeking only some minimal, catalytic gravity. From the borderlands touching water country comes a charged wind; the leaves on the golden birch begin to chatter and above the sudden snapping, fire-popping noise he barely hears the reply to his question. He shifts, and in the bowl the sake ripples. One gilded leaf afloat in the liquid; even here Senju and the fruit of his fingers invade his domain.

"What did you say."

"I said, Madara-sama, that we have decided to accept the Senju's condition of deferring missions which would require conflict with them."

"Why?"

"Because we have no choice."

The bowl tilts so sharply the sake nearly spills. He catches it and sips, and the warmth that usually seems to glow tonight seems to glitter.

The man is saying "Senju-dono was pleased. He said that Izuna-sama would have—"

The sound as the sake hits the man's face is like a slap. Madara's hand hangs in the air inches from his nose, fingers clawed as if still holding the bowl; two shards of porcelain lay split on the floorboards where Hashirama's melon did a few mornings ago.

"You are my second now that he is dead," he says, "but only my second. With what right did you go to him without my permission."

The skin of the old man's jaw and cheek is red as a welt but still he does not flinch as he sponges the sake from his face. It crosses Madara's mind only once that the liquid was near boiling point, and then thinks that if it had been otherwise he would not have thrown it.

It was good porcelain, worked to the thinness of a seashell and painted with a crane in a single line, and its resilience had sustained him. Until the crash he was certain it would not break. But of course this was a certainty that had failed him before; it failed him when his brother bled to death not half a league from him, and then, too, he had thought until he saw the slit throat that he would not—

—could not—

His hands are shaking.

His retainer moves back a step so that he is outdoors on the courtyard steps, halfway between the purple shadow of the room and the brightness of the outside, lit by heavy pearl lanterns. He sinks to a full bow.

For a moment Madara is certain it has begun to rain but no, the liquid in his hands is only blood drawn by the porcelain, jagged edges making surface cuts. The crane's beak pointed and a ridge where the craftsman had tried to suggest feathers.

"Your disloyalty speaks for itself," says his voice floating eerie and disembodied in the low pressure. It was not his imagination: it is becoming cold in earnest. The shards in his hand are chilled as glass. "Do the others feel the same way?"

"The others feel, as do I, that we work for Uchiha," as if speaking to a child, "not for you."

His face is ghoulish like a pattern painted on paper lanterns. They have both been forged with the same genetic alchemy, sharing the scaffolding of taut cheekbones upon which innumerable proud faces have been poured, but tonight he looks nothing at all like family.

Before leaving he adds only, "Much has changed, Madara-sama. Do not believe we were not shaken by his death."

"You have lost the right to speak of it."

"I will send someone—"

"You have _lost the right_. Get away from me."

Nothing is left to him but to banish useless men from his chamber, he who himself a vessel for their truce, the only one still living who still had enough integrity to make it.

He treads out into the courtyard stepping gingerly. The paving stones are cold as porcelain shards. In the courtyard he brandishes his throat, matches the angle of it against the insolent angle of the sky.

He has been cauterized and burned all the way down to an effigy of roiling ash under his hatred, the feet of space behind Hashirama's shoji door a last burial ground where he has been entombed alive. All he has ever learned in his life is that the anger of one's blood is as real as sustenance, a corporeal nourishment—starving men's currency, glutting the heartsack upon its own fuels—you could no more forsake it than you could forsake food. All the sins and the injustices that forged a people, they were a method of construction, an undeniable celestial scaffolding. It was a privilege and not a slight to kneel before those blank-eyed grievances and offer up the self; for without their directive presence there was no self that could have offered anything at all.

_Rain, damn you_, he hisses at the sky, still a murky uncertainty like a bog splattered over the heavens, but the thunder groans and it does not rain. The leaves shudder and shudder as if begging to be released. _Rain, for god's sake _and in the truce compound within its tiny envelope of nature the storm hurls itself as if against glass, but it is only a shadow of weather, and here, it seems, even the rain will not hear his voice.

* * *

In his dreams, he sees a battlefield where they never fought. Everything stippled with sunlight and the kind of scent that spreads, glittering, up his breastbone and into his heart.

They were never here, but he sees Izuna and he understands.

"I am not strong," Izuna says to him. "I am not commanding, nor steadfast. I cannot be your lord, or your ally."

"You are my brother," Madara says. "You have no need to be either."

But Izuna shakes his head. This is not what he wants to hear. He puts his hands together in a seal, and the genjutsu breaks. The scent disappears. The sunlight fades, but not as true sunlight does. Drop by drop, as water leaks from a decanter. Madara pinions back; he opens his mouth, but his throat is dry, and on his hands the last vestiges of his brother's sunlight, soaking his skin with phantom heat.

* * *

He tires of the Uzumaki girl's presence within the third week and forbids her to speak to him unless she is demonstrating one of her quaintly arcane seals. She has small hands, absentminded manners, a irritating habit of subordinating herself to her commander so absently and easily that the subordination itself becomes an act of dignity.

But when sealing she is bearable, the serene academic energy she exudes and the way the perfect meticulous construction of her hairstyle somehow devolves into a profusion of aimless red locks and flyaways. They spend a few tolerable mornings tracing the designs onto seal paper made from butterfly wings. Shinobi retain vestiges of their arts even in daily tasks, and as befits a woman who has staked her life upon her ability to manipulate others' techniques she spends most of her time doing nothing but listening and watching, blue eyes unblinking. When she talks, it is spoken calligraphy.

"You find us all insufferably primitive," he says on one occasion. Her quietness is a deep pool and in her presence he becomes a child again, seized by the inexplicable need to disturb the surface of the water.

"A reasonable conclusion, Uchiha-dono."

He makes a small click in his throat. "This is your time for—breeding, or conquering lands in your own country. Why did you come here."

She dips her brush, skims off the excess ink, and with a flicked glance at his own haphazard drawing makes a stroke so perfectly calibrated the heart stills at the sight. "I would be most pleased if you were to be less wasteful with my ink."

"Don't evade my question."

"Do not waste my ink."

He takes a larger swab of it simply to spite her and resumes his design. They are working on a selective seal which affects only some of what it touches. It is her theory that this might be used effectively for medical sterilization or perhaps dimensional travel if synthesized with Uchiha genjutsu. She lifts her parchment and waves it once to dry it, as another woman might wave a handkerchief.

Then she says, "Senju-dono has begun a great experiment."

He dries his with an almost-katon, just a bending of heat waves so that the air beneath the parchment shimmers. Their brushes click as they lay them atop their stands and she seems to relax visibly at the sound. Duties finished, she directs her gaze to the open shoji door and the courtyard beyond it, the stones decoupaged with golden birch leaves. The way she allows herself physical indulgences is childlike and regular most obvious in the way she glances at Hashirama above her fan. Skilled with rationing as are all shinobi women.

"Is that really the reason?"

She does nothing. Politely. "Our alliance mandates that we send support for him in his time of need. It would have been my father, but I requested the assignment. I am fond of," she hesitates "experiments. I did not know they could be done with people."

Everything she says is wrong and makes his head hurt. "This is only temporary."

She tilts her head and a long whorl of red hair detaches itself from a bun, tracing the standing collar of her robes. She has a four-layer ensemble trimmed in some quiet shade of purple and he wonders what her enclave must be like, that even kunoichi might grow accustomed to clothes like this. Sedentary techniques breed shinobi who ape civilian culture. He imagines Uchiha women looking the way she does and his mouth tastes like bile.

"All seasons die and are reborn," she says, probably quoting something. "I knew from the moment I met Senju-dono that those who followed him would be witness to a changing time. Few receive such honor in their lifetimes."

"Why should the time change at his will?"

"So that we might make peace with our dead as well as one another,"she answers easily. He reflects that she of all people would have understood the terms of the 'experiment,'; her entire existence is dependent on the ability to translate abstracts into concretes that can then be locked into whatever organic matrix she desires, in this case, he supposes, her own mind.

"Hashirama is a fool," he says. "To place his trust in something so fickle as peace."

"I will respectfully disagree. I believe it is more foolhardy to place his trust in someone as fickle as you, but of course it is not my place to say it."

"Stop talking nonsense."

"You must know," she says. "Our clan has no bloodline, and yours has only that. You made a weapon of your body and I made one of my mind. We have always changed ourselves to fit the world. He is—how can he understand, growing things as he does? If he does not care for the lay of the land he simply makes it anew. The way he sees it perhaps the world can be changed to fit what he is. Perhaps the world should."

"He would do anything for peace," Madara mocks, and she narrows her eyes before retrieving the seal tag from the mat. Mito's particular courtesy is so deeply ingrained that it becomes a handicap, stoppering her reactions, sealing her secrets deep into little-girl limbs with the rest of her family's ancient blood.

Picking up the seal tag, she thrusts her hand into the center of the whirlpool mark. When she withdraws it, the lacquer on her nails and string of jade beads encircling her wrist have disappeared, leaving only the white anaemic hand square-trimmed fingernails and knuckles with the peculiar ridge from kunai handles. It takes him a moment to realize she has ended in the conversation in the only courteous way she knows, not forcing a conclusion as Hashirama with his propensity for resolution routinely does. Lifting his own parchment, he flexes his fingers and follows suit.

* * *

Izuna had always been well protected, either by Madara or by the cousin who had gravitated towards him effortlessly in his sixteenth winter, a stockily built boy with low-hanging brows who frowned as much as Izuna smiled and shouted at him when he cried. Once Madara had come upon them behind a high grassy knoll on the field, the other boy making bruises on Izuna's hips, panting harsh breaths and Izuna's low lilting laughter like water seeping down into cracks. All that winter Izuna was dreamy, preoccupied, and Madara let him be; boys did not survive to adulthood without understanding nature and its odd impositions.

Izuna killed him a year later, just after Madara killed his first retainer. The fight was short and ultimately the boy had fallen to a kunai in his back like the novice Madara had known he was. His own retainer had bubbled up blood and tears and cried clutching and biting at Madara's palms but Izuna's friend was sullen to the very end, and quietly complacent when Izuna dislodged his kunai and wiped one side then the other before bending down to pet the dead boy's hair.

As they prepared the body for burial the men did not show surprise; said he hadn't seemed himself for a while—too absent, as if dazed—no, as if asleep. Transfixed by a beautiful dream and reluctant to wake.

"I feel quite—helpless," Izuna had said, and when he looked at Madara his wide beautiful eyes with their new pattern were lovelier than ever, wet-fringed lashes, a jolting intelligence turning itself over in their depths. He seemed fully alert for the first time in a year.

Madara felt a hot, hard rush of pride and put his hand on his brother's shoulder. Izuna eyed it for a moment then smiled, closed-mouthed.

At the funeral Izuna had stood apart from the men, yawned once, delicately, with many small pearly teeth. He wasn't very tall, but he held himself with such care, like water cupped in a palm. The funeral clothes suited him. As the pyre burned he had stayed until the dusk, and then looked at Madara, unseeing and allseeing—with him they were rarely ever any different.

"Your genjutsu is ended," Madara had said.

The dead boy had not ceded to him in a matter of one moment; it had been a wash of them. Izuna sighed.

"Let me stay for a moment longer," he'd said then, "only—only one moment."

* * *

"Peace is women's work," civilians say, because their women do not go into the world. Hashirama is the only Senju Madara has known who understands it is a tribute and not an insult.

In the very beginning he built the longhouse so that women's quarters were clustered together and contained within an inner sanctum, while the men's chambers were spread in an elongated square so that only a select number would come into contact with one another at a time. By the second week of negotiations, the sliding doors in the middle rooms have been thrown wide, and the Uchiha and Senju women flit from one room to another without thought for whose banners adorn the braziers. Children scatter like dropped beads and Hashirama gives them small, civilian tasks—thatching the roofs of the watchmen's huts, scraping crabapple shells and twigs from the antique cedar planes of the shingles. When Madara shades his eyes and looks up to count them, the color of their hair and eyes is indistinguishable; they are all knock-kneed sprites blown translucent and indistinct in the glare of the backlit sky. Hashirama's project of equality is like this: the task of dulling all former colors into the same carefully neutral grey.

"They look happy," Hashirama says. Hashirama has many expressions for 'happy.' Madara has the sense that he has not learned the half of them.

Under the guise of observing the children of their respective enclaves they stand with only the edges of their sleeves touching at the railing of one of the terraces. The women have commandeered the adjacent eastern wall for—absurd, even if it is utilitarian—_laundry_, and even the dull colors of Senju linens look like an explosion aganst neutral Uchiha blues. It is the ninth day of negotiations, they have sent a messenger to the daimyo, and today Senju Tobirama taught a group of Uchiha girls how to make tea with lotus roots.

They are living in a time capsule. A tense golden bubble, but the girls smile at Madara for the first time in his recent memory. He does not smile back, but for them, he stands like this, his white sleeve touching Hashirama's as carefully as a shadow, and says, "Is there nothing to do here but speak of inanities."

"If there were, I would consider it a failure indeed," says Hashirama. He shifts their sleeves where they touch and pays it no more mind. He has just washed and smells too pungently of something herbal and sweet, aloe perhaps or something more medicinal. The smell is cloying. Fruit on the verge of rotting spilling over with its own life, underneath it the private new milk odor that is all his own. It makes Madara nauseous and he passes a hand over his eyes.

"You keep missing the purpose of being here," he says.

"Is that so?"

"We didn't come here to be _happy_."

Hashirama does not appear affected by this. "Does that mean I shouldn't allow those who have come some small measure of happiness?"

"_You _didn't allow anyone anything. It takes two to reach an accord."

And much to his surprise, Hashirama takes a slice of Madara's kosode between two fingers and tugs, a strangely lighthearted gesture and one more intrusive than if he had laughed in his face. Heat floods the base of Madara's stomach. He clenches the railing with white knuckles.

"It does, at that," says Hashirama, "but this is the first I've heard it from you."

There is a sudden sound like a flock of beating wings but it turns out to be only the laundry, pounded dry by the flat paddles women apparently use in both enclaves to dry their linens. Near the doorway of one of the inner rooms an Uchiha woman is shouting Senju Tobirama away from the clotheslines. Sun is setting, settling acres of light the translucency of chiffon over the truce compound, imbuing the unlit lanterns with the sheen of pearls. Autumn is a heady thing filled with waiting. Still—here, as Hashirama had said, the air is saturated with some small measure of happiness. Divided among so many people like rations it was naturally diluted, but its presence was unmistakable nonetheless. You couldn't escape from the sensation; it was like clean water or washed cloth—its simplicity devastating, fragile. Easily contaminated, yet coercive in its own right.

"I should never have come to you with gifts or faced you in a meeting hall," Hashirama is saying, "You and I, we—we've always done best on our own, haven't we."

Knuckles clenching and unclenching on the railing. "What does it matter? You have what you wanted."

"Do I?"

Hashirama turns to look at him. The slap of the laundry, a telltale crackle now as Uchiha blow careful katons into the braziers. A feminine voice inflected with the Senju lilt says _perhaps I can tell you now, it was always the loveliest thing I'd seen on the battlefield _and some woman of Madara's enclave laughs as if this too is a natural, inherited technique. _It's not so difficult_. How easily his people lie, undone with kindness alone.

"Against my wishes you have even achieved cohabitation. What else is there?"

"Are you upset about that? It was easier than a marriage," and—there it is, the first smile together for the first time. Lopsided smirks tilting towards one another like halves of a drawbridge, just boys laughing and for once the thought is not unwelcome. He thinks: I have known this man for decades, his body and the mind cupped inside it, how is it possible, how is it _logical, _that we should still have things yet to discover?

"In fact, I considered that as well," Hashirama is continuing, still holding that smile, "that is how the Senju have made most of our lasting alliances."

"I know how you acquired your so-called thousand techniques. Do you think the women you breed with would call them marriages?"

"We take them in afterwards."

There is nothing about Hashirama's sheer blindness that is frightening except his ignorance of it. "Assimilating a people is an act of rape, not generosity."

Something in Hashirama's eyes flashes, flipped-coin fast and silver; Madara's hands unclench and wrap the rail differently like hoisting the kusarigama but the moment passes; the chance comes down stalemates. Hashirama tilts his head when he turns away and a sheaf of his hair touches Madara's exposed clavicle. The texture is like cornsilk.

"You have your ways and we have ours," he says finally. Madara realizes he has more power to anger him now than he has ever had before; this man has grown complacent with so many Uchiha mouths to breathe fire into his hearthplaces. "My mother was one of those women, and she was proud until the end. For my part, I owe my mokuton to women like that."

It appalls him that the technique has a name. This, too, an indicator of Hashirama's particular breed of benevolent arrogance; does one name his arms or legs? "Will you do the same?"

"Marry?"

"Breed for a bloodline."

Hashirama actually considers it. "Perhaps not. In this age we married to gain bloodlines—you look at me that way, but would we have survived against clans like yours without them? We have no bloodline of our own, all we have ever had is—" he spreads his hands, the thickly lashed luck lines laid down as if by switches, "our virility. That was what we needed then. It is possible that in the years to come we will marry for diplomacy, or for something else entirely."

"That sort of arrangement works well enough for civilians. For shinobi, marital alliances only dilute valuable clan would agree."

"Of course." Hashirama does not seem surprised at the objection; it must be something he has already considered. "Cohabitation was the next best option. There come moments in all people's history when they yearn the chance to live for something other than battle, and it so happened that you came upon yours at the same time we did."

"You took a terrible chance."

Hashirama says, "I will do anything for peace."

"Be as that may. It will be nothing but a massacre if they cannot mix," says Madara, "people don't change the way they live so easily."

"If they are able to forget the old ways, they will."

Anger is hot and familiar and Madara blankets himself in it. "How dareyou presume to tell us what to forget and what to remember—"

And then Hashirama's hand that has been idly brushing at the side of his sleeve draws back, moves forward again, and seals itself over his wrist. Madara yanks back just harsh enough to spark violence but Hashirama's fingers do not lessen their gentle pressure. Their skin does not touch. The film of white linen between them is like a skein of oil. A taint or a shield, he doesn't know.

He snaps his neck up and Hashirama's gaze swallows his. That too-sweet, medicinal smell again, the cleanliness bordering on sterility.

They stand that way for long minutes, poised as if in a dance knowing what it will mean to make a scene here, at the railing before which the patchwork of mingled laundry is like the evening's own banner. Once he saw a flock of cranes flying over the moor and the blue twilight had just been light enough to touch their wings with ivory radiance, great pale sheets of cloth forming a delta in the sky. Now the noise like birds taking to the air has ended, but the courtyard is still imbued with a sensation of beings in flight. The light from braziers gilds the linens and the people folding them. Imparts to the scene its own historical inflection. Who knows how important this moment it is, if it is important at all, but those here will remember it as such, and Hashirama's fingertips making triangular, violet shadows on Madara's yukata have the lightness of feathers and the heaviness of wings.

"You are wearing civilian clothing," he says, sounding amused. "It doesn't mean you have forgotten how to wear your fatigues."

Madara's throat is too dry and the air too dense. The grip loosens, Madara pulls his hand back and the white cloth catches on each one of Hashirama's fingers before falling free. Heavy and pendular and nothing like black fatigues in its promise of indolence. Of rest.

"Don't—"

"It suits you."

Madara pulls back. He walks fourteen paces to the place where the porch turns and then he allows himself to pick up speed only after he has turned the corner and passed every second door. The sound of his feet slapping does not accelerate beyond a manageable rhythm. By the time he has reached the door of his own chamber he is clammy and soaked with sweat as if he has run all the way.

It takes him four tries to unknot the sash of the outfit and scrabble out of it, scraping intensely as if removing a film. His clan fatigues seem to envelop him in shadow as he pulls them over his head but for once the relief is not instantaneous. It takes longer to settle into them; his muscles chafe like the tongue remembering a long-unspoken word. The same hesitance, the same hitch.

He puts his face in his hands. A sweet, medicinal scent. The sense of the sea looming, walls of water waiting to submerge him.

On the floor next to him the white linen lies in tented folds, suffused with the chill from outdoors. The color of surrender and cataracts over blind eyes. His hand hovers over it poised in the thumb-forefinger circle that aims the katon. He gathers breath for the flame and tastes metal behind his teeth.

_See_, says Izuna. _Is this not the world I showed you, also?_

Slowly he releases the seal. Moves the civilian outfit to the side, sliding over the boards made from Hashirama's body. The rasp of linen on the grain is indulgent, too heady to contemplate.

He disentangles his hands from the pile and leaves it there, waiting, with his discarded laundry.

* * *

Three things Izuna had taught him:

That it was possible to down in sweetness, and never desire an escape.

That sweetness too was an illusion—a voice, a hand, a droplet of juice on a jutting wristbone. The promise of respite in the face of a long, long fight, quiet moments of scholarship and the sight in the morning of wooden beams where there had once been only the vast upturned sky.

That these things, too, could not take place in moments, but were spread slowly and constantly, like notes of multifacetedlight.

Two he has learned on his own:

That you cannot succumb to this sweetness by the hand of a lord, or an ally. Only a brother. Only a friend. Only something more.

That you will never, know, when you have succumbed. That it will surround you without warning. That a child who has never seen the sea will not know enough to put up a fight, and therefore must always be afraid, even as he strains towards what looks, from under deep water, like sunlight at the shore.

* * *

"My brother is indisposed," says Tobirama, and bows too quickly.

"I know what happens to him when the leaves begin to fall. Perhaps better than you" and the younger Senju's eyes narrow. He places one hand against the opposite doorjamb next to Madara's temple. Madara pities him, but not in any significant way.

"If this is about the Nakano, he offered it as a gesture of _goodwill_—"

"It is not about the Nakano. Grant me entrance."

"If you have a message, I will carry it."

"Senju-dono," comes Mito's voice from inside, "grant him entrance."

She is reading to Hashirama from a scroll. Hashirama looks as he always has at this moment of late autumn, drawn and exhausted shaking a little when he picks up his chopsticks. He is eating from a bowl of green vegetables tossed with some spiced cooking oil the sort of dish force-fed to children to keep them from illness. When he sees Madara he smiles and sets the bowl aside; it clatters but Mito reaches out and steadies it without looking.

"I am pleased to see you," is what Hashirama says. "What can I do for you?"

"The leaves were falling today."

Hashirama's lips part. "Is—is that what you came for?"

"Yes."

"I see." Blinking too heavily. Then he looks at Mito as if to demand an explanation; she only sits with hands folded. Madara unfolds the satchet of tea he brought and gives it to her.

"This is tea made with something called a persimmon. It helps with fatigue. I am told it grows in wind country."

"I will brew it immediately, Uchiha-dono. Please stay with him." She glides forward and slides the door shut; Madara hears Tobirama chiding her as they leave. He looks at Hashirama.

"If you have some witless notion that this has been a matter of _ceremony_," Hashirama says, and Madara stops dead before he realizes the other man is laughing at him. "Don't look like that. She came to read me poetry, I believe she finds it easier than conversation. Come and sit, if you took the trouble to visit. Stay awhile."

—_only one moment._

He takes Mito's vacated seat. Hashirama retrieves his bowl of vegetables and selects a piece of kale. Madara thinks briefly that he will put a chopstick through his throat if he says anything but fortunately Hashirama seems content to eat, pausing every now and then to catch his breath. Madara says, "What does it feel like?"

"It's only fatigue. It comes when the first leaf falls."

"I am aware of _that_. Why do you think we mounted offensives at this time every year? You fainted on the front lines when I was six winters of age."

"Did I—" A strange expression crosses Hashirama's features.

"What is it?"

Hashirama meets his eyes. "Curious. I didn't know we were of the same age."

There is no proper response to this, so as Mito did, Madara folds his hands in his lap. There is stubble on Hashirama's jaw and his hair lies tossed over his shoulder in a haphazard plait but even in his disarray the sense of him still fills the small room. His chamber is not as sterile as Madara's. Maps are laid out in plain sight, covered in meandering handwriting that stops as if the author simply had too many ideas to finish each sentence in one particular way. The blankets layered over his tatami are worked with a pattern of walking herons. Someone's design, someone's energy focused on adornments for his accessories.

Eventually Hashirama lays the empty bowl down and says "It feels like something within me is being pulled, very gently. Before particularly harsh winters it occurs more quickly—the case when I fainted. It is not unpleasant, only…surprising. I believe it is very like your sensitivity as the year grows colder."

"How are you aware of that…"

"There was a saying in our enclave—'wrapped up like an Uchiha—'"

"What?"

"When winter came, and women wanted the young ones to wear more clothing, they would tell them to—well, it was only an old wives' saying. I used to have to chide Tobi the same way. Once in an ill temper I told him I envied you Izuna-dono's obedience."

There is only one reason the words do not chafe, and that is the real sadness in Hashirama's eyes. It is no less appalling for the fact that his body is draped on the mat with a nearly sexual listlessness, an accepted, even indulged exhaustion. Here in his own chambers he is invasive not like the directional vector of his battlefield aura but like weather, an absent miasma of power that coats furniture and Madara's skin alike. A chilled fog on the limbs.

Madara realizes suddenly that he is damp with perspiration. He yokes his consternation and changes the subject. "Uzumaki-san has not returned with the tea."

"It's all right. Tobi always detains her. My brother has yet to realize that a woman's irritation is not a sign that she wishes to be bedded." He genuinely does not seem to take issue with what he is speaking about and to whom he is speaking. The odd novelty is such that Madara smiles against his will, and Hashirama looks so alarmed that the smile nearly becomes a laugh.

He slides his next words forward like a dish to a guest, cautious, rehearsed, half-hoping it will not be accepted.

"In our enclave, children feared you were near when the spring came too early."

Hashirama is no longer the boy who blushed upon finding his body against his; now with their lives brought into that same ungainly proximity he merely raises an eyebrow. He is, however, famed for his recovery, and draws his composure back around himself almost immediately, as if this too is one of the god-given reflexes he received with his bloodline. "Is that so?"

_No_, Madara thinks. _It was only I who thought that_.

"The…mokuton…gave your people many things," he says anyway. "Buildings when the rest of the world slept in tents. Crops in times of famine. Any medicines you needed, wherever you were. Yet I felt often that our children envied you only the—"

He cannot say it. Hashirama has the patient, blank expression he would often wear waiting for him to recover in battle, to unveil something unprecedented. When Madara is unable to, he does what is by now habit and delivers his finishing blow.

"You don't have to say it. That is what everyone envies: the early spring."

He closes his eyes, then; autumn's exhaustion is suddenly very evident on his face, the tender skin on each side of his lips. The four walls of the room seem to press against Madara with such insistence his lungs compress; he cannot breathe, and then he realizes Hashirama is touching his wrist and feels the other man's fatigue, a convalescent transparency, a tenderness of sorts worn down to the bone. The fingers of his hand aching as if injected with some brimming foreign luminescence.

"Why are you here, Madara?" asks Hashirama.

The name in his mouth, excised of suffixes. They faced one another as enemies, as ceremonial representatives, perhaps as friends, now they are somewhere else entirely and there are no words but the ones they were born with.

Izuna, he thinks. Izuna, I am lost. I have drowned, and I am to be slain as you slew our cousin, and as your loss slew me, and now my heart is breaking and I am far, endlessly far, from the shore you cast us from in our bedrolls so long ago. I have fought this truce for so tirelessly, but look—I have already made it, have been caught in its currents for so long. And this man knew, and I do not know if the hand he extends is to push me deeper or to pull me to the surface.

He takes a deep breath. The diver readying himself.

"I do not know what you are, to me," he says. "But for a moment longer—only a moment—we yearn for the same thing."

"And what is that? Dominance?"

The smile, gently mocking. A sweet voice and a sun-shattered glade, and Madara realizes it no longer matters to him if he is able to surface.

"No," he says. "Spring."

* * *

_end_


End file.
